Chapter 15
“Mama, look! Look what I did!”
The voice—bright, demanding, utterly delighted with itself—arrested Tobias before he’d even crossed the threshold of Redmond Park. He stood motionless in the entrance hall, his travelling coat still damp from the journey, and felt something in his chest twist painfully tight.
Henry’s voice. Not the uncertain babbling of the infant he’d left behind, but proper words, full of personality and life.
Six months. He’d been gone six whole months.
“I see it, darling,” came Amelia’s reply, warm and indulgent. “Very clever indeed. Shall we build it even taller?”
Tobias’s feet moved before his mind could catch up, drawn toward that laughter like a man dying of thirst toward water. He climbed the stairs two at a time, heedless of Pemberton’s startled call behind him, heedless of propriety or protocol or the travel dust still clinging to his clothes.
The nursery door stood ajar, and he paused there, one hand braced against the frame, simply staring.
Sunlight streamed through uncovered windows—when had the mourning drapes been removed?
—painting everything in shades of gold. The room itself had been transformed.
Gone were the dark, oppressive furnishings Edward had preferred.
In their place: cream-coloured walls, cheerful paintings of animals, a rocking horse in the corner that Tobias didn’t recognize.
Even the air smelled different—lighter somehow, carrying the faint scent of lavender and something else.
Something that made his throat constrict with an emotion he dared not name.
Happiness. The room smelled of happiness.
And there, in the centre of it all, Henry.
The boy had grown impossibly. He could not believe that anyone could change this much in a mere six months, the thought as he perceived Henry’s fierce concentration as he stacked wooden blocks with the dedication of an architect planning Westminster Abbey.
His dark curls—Edward’s curls, though Tobias tried not to think of that—fell across his forehead as he worked, and his tongue peeked out between his lips in a gesture of such pure, unconscious determination that Tobias found himself smiling despite everything.
A maid sat in the corner doing needlework, but Henry paid her no mind. His entire world had narrowed to those blocks, to the tower he was building with such single-minded purpose—
The tower collapsed with a clatter that made Tobias wince. But Henry, rather than crying, simply laughed and clapped his hands.
“Again!” he announced to no one in particular. “Build it again!”
That was when he looked up and saw Tobias.
The boy froze, his small face going comically still as his brown eyes—Amelia’s eyes, thank God—widened with the sort of profound shock only a child could manage. His mouth formed a perfect O of surprise.
Then recognition flickered across his features, tentative at first, then blazing into something that made Tobias’s vision blur at the edges.
“Papa?”
The word was uncertain, half-formed, more question than statement. But clear. Devastatingly, impossibly clear.
Tobias felt his heart stop. Then start again, beating so hard he wondered if the entire household could hear it.
“Lad,” he managed, his voice rougher than he’d intended. He crossed the room and crouched to Henry’s level, bringing himself face-to-face with the child who’d haunted his dreams for six months. “Did you miss me, then?”
Henry’s answer came not in words but in action.
The boy launched himself forward with the fearless enthusiasm of the very young, small arms wrapping around Tobias’s neck with enough force to nearly topple them both.
He pressed his face against Tobias’s shoulder and repeated that word—papa, papa, papa—as though testing its weight, its truth.
“Close enough, lad,” Tobias murmured, ruffling the dark curls that smelled of soap and sunshine. His throat felt impossibly tight. “Close enough indeed.”
He should correct the boy. Should explain that he was Uncle Tobias, that papa was someone else, someone gone.
But the words lodged somewhere between his heart and his mouth, refusing to emerge.
And when Henry pulled back to beam at him with such uncomplicated joy, such perfect trust, Tobias found he couldn’t bear to dim that light.
“Did you bring me something?” Henry demanded with the shameless acquisitiveness of childhood. “From London?”
Despite everything, Tobias laughed. “Mercenary little creature, aren’t you?
Let me look at you properly first.” He held the boy at arm’s length, studying him with an intensity that bordered on ridiculous.
The changes were everywhere. He’d grown taller, his baby roundness giving way to the leaner lines of toddlerhood.
His hands were larger, his legs steadier, his entire bearing more confident.
Six months. Six months of Henry’s life he’d missed entirely. Six months of first words and discoveries and laughter he’d never hear.
The loss of it struck with unexpected force.
“You’ve grown,” he said, his voice catching on the observation. “Quite the young gentleman now, I see.”
“I’m big now,” Henry informed him solemnly.
“You are indeed… Soon you will be the one to pick me up!”
Henry giggled at the teasing tone even if he couldn’t grasp the words, and the sound—that pure, unguarded delight—made something in Tobias’s chest crack open wider.
I’ve missed you, he wanted to say. Every day. Every hour. You’ve no idea how the absence of you hollowed me out completely.
But such confessions were hardly appropriate to burden a child with. So instead, he simply held Henry closer and pressed his face briefly against those soft curls and breathed in the scent of him—milk and innocence and everything good in a world that so often felt irredeemably dark.
“Lord Tobias.”
The voice—quiet, composed, achingly familiar—made his entire body go rigid.
He looked up.
And forgot, quite comprehensively, how to breathe.
Amelia stood in the doorway, one hand resting lightly against the frame as though she needed its support.
She wore a day dress of pale blue muslin that caught the afternoon light, her hair was arranged in soft curls, rather than the severe style she’d favoured during mourning.
But it wasn’t the dress or the hair that arrested him so completely.
It was her.
She looked... alive. That was the only word his stunned mind could supply.
The pale, fragile widow he’d left behind—the ghost who’d drifted through Redmond Park’s corridors like a wraith seeking permanent escape—was gone entirely.
In her place stood someone he recognized and didn’t recognize in equal measure.
Colour bloomed in her cheeks, natural and warm.
Her eyes, those blue eyes that had been so carefully shuttered before, now held a light he’d glimpsed only in rare, unguarded moments.
Her posture had changed too—still elegant, still graceful, but lacking that terrible brittleness that had suggested she might shatter at any moment.
She looked like a woman who’d finally stopped merely surviving and remembered how to live.
And she was looking at him with an expression he couldn’t quite read—surprise certainly, perhaps pleasure, but beneath it something more complicated. Something that made his pulse quicken for reasons that had nothing to do with the journey’s exertion.
“Lady Amelia.” He rose slowly, Henry still balanced on one hip, and executed a bow that would have been more elegant had he not been holding twenty pounds of squirming toddler. “Forgive the intrusion. I arrived somewhat... unexpectedly.”
“So I see.” Her voice was steady, perfectly polite, but something flickered in her eyes—there and gone too quickly to identify. “Had we known to expect you, we would have prepared a proper welcome.”
“I sent no word ahead.” He shifted Henry’s weight, acutely aware of how dishevelled he must appear.
Travel-stained coat, hair doubtless standing on end from the wind, probably reeking of horse and leather.
Hardly the dignified viscount making a formal return to his estate.
“I... the journey was rather spontaneous.”
“I see.”
Did she? He couldn’t tell. Her expression remained carefully neutral, giving nothing away. This was new too—this controlled composure that lacked the desperate brittleness of grief but suggested instead a woman who’d learned to guard herself deliberately.
“You look well,” he said at last, because the silence was becoming unbearable and he needed to fill it with something, anything. “The time here seems to have agreed with you.”
“It has.” She moved further into the room, and he tracked the motion like a starving man watching food. “The estate has kept me quite occupied. There’s been much to attend to.”
“So your letters indicated.” He glanced around the transformed nursery, using it as an excuse to look anywhere but at her face. “You’ve made changes. Improvements.”
“I hope you don’t mind.” For the first time, uncertainty crept into her voice. “Some of the rooms felt rather oppressive in their original arrangement. I thought perhaps—”
“They’re perfect,” he interrupted quickly. Too quickly, judging by the way her eyebrows lifted fractionally. “I mean—the changes suit. The house feels... lighter.”
“That was my intention.” She held his gaze now, and something passed between them—some wordless understanding that made his skin prickle with awareness. “Redmond Park has been in mourning long enough. I thought it time to let in some light.”
Henry chose that moment to squirm impatiently. “Down, Papa! Want to play!”
Tobias set him carefully on the floor, watching as the boy immediately returned to his blocks with the single-minded focus of the very young. Papa. The word echoed in the space between them, impossible to ignore.
“I’m sorry.” The words felt inadequate, hollow. “I should have—I could have written more often, or perhaps visited before now—”